Remember.

  The voice followed me into consciousness, lingering like smoke after a fire. Not quite audible, but present. I lay still, staring at the water-stained ceiling of my apartment, trying to hold onto the fragments of the dream before they dissolved completely. The symbols had been clearer this time, more intricate. And the voice—a woman's voice—held an urgency that clung to me even in waking.

  Vesper's weight landed on my chest, her single amber eye fixing me with an accusatory stare that clearly communicated breakfast was late. I scratched behind her ears mechanically, my mind still caught in the liminal space between dream and reality.

  "Just a dream, Ves," I murmured. "Just another fucking dream."

  The cat tilted her head, unconvinced.

  My phone buzzed on the nightstand—a text from Dr. Chen.

  Santorini crate needs completion today. Priority.

  No greeting, no pleasantries. Pure Chen. I texted back an affirmative, though my gut tightened at the thought of returning to that crate. The memory of my blood tracing the symbol, the impossible click of the lock releasing—it couldn't have happened the way I remembered. Sleep deprivation and overwork had warped the mundane into something mysterious.

  Yet the cut on my palm was real enough, a thin red line that stung under the shower spray.

  The museum was already bustling when I arrived, earlier than usual. A school group clustered around a display of Greek pottery, their teacher struggling to maintain order as kids pressed fingerprints against the glass. Security guards watched with the resigned expressions of men who'd seen it all before.

  I nodded to James Okafor at the security desk. The tall guard returned my greeting with a slight incline of his head, his dark eyes lingering on me a beat longer than normal. Something about James had always struck me as incongruous with his blue uniform and badge—a watchfulness that went beyond standard security protocols.

  "Rough night?" he asked, his voice a low rumble.

  I blinked, surprised by the personal inquiry. James rarely initiated conversation.

  "That obvious, huh?"

  "You look..." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "Like you've seen something that doesn't fit your understanding of the world."

  The oddly specific observation hit too close to home. I forced a laugh.

  "Just insomnia. Nothing some coffee won't fix."

  James nodded, his expression neutral. "Some things can't be explained away so easily, Mr. Reeves."

  Before I could respond to this cryptic statement, he turned to address a visitor's question, effectively dismissing me. I stood there momentarily, thrown by the exchange, before heading to Research Room C.

  The sealed crate waited exactly as I'd left it—secured with straps, the modern locks engaged. No evidence remained of last night's inexplicable incident. I set up my workstation methodically, arranging tools and documentation forms with the precise attention to detail Dr. Chen expected. The routine helped settle my nerves.

  Despite my care, my hand trembled slightly as I approached the crate. Ridiculous. I was a research assistant at a respected institution, not some superstitious treasure hunter. I inserted the key in the modern lock, turned it, and removed the security straps.

  The ancient locking mechanism remained disengaged from the night before. I eased the lid open slowly, half-expecting... what? A burst of ancient air? A curse? I'd watched too many bad archaeological horror films as a kid.

  Inside, nestled in protective packing material, lay an assortment of smaller artifacts. Most appeared to be personal items—jewelry, small tools, a handful of clay tablets with partial inscriptions. Standard catalog procedure required recording each item's dimensions, weight, condition, and preliminary identification before assigning inventory numbers.

  I worked methodically through the collection, my tension gradually easing as the familiar process took over. Nothing supernatural here. Just artifacts from people who'd lived and died thousands of years ago, leaving behind these small tokens of their existence.

  At the bottom of the crate, wrapped separately in acid-free tissue, I found it—a small pendant, roughly the size of a quarter. Jade, or some similar stone, polished to a soft sheen. Unlike the other pieces, which showed clear Greek or Minoan influence, this one bore markings I couldn't immediately place in any known artistic tradition.

  My breath caught. The symbols etched into its surface—geometric patterns with precise angles and intersections—matched those from my dreams with uncanny accuracy. Not similar. Identical.

  Remember.

  The voice whispered through my mind so vividly I glanced over my shoulder, half-expecting to see someone standing there. The room remained empty.

  With unsteady hands, I lifted the pendant for closer examination. The stone felt unexpectedly warm against my skin, as if it had been lying in sunlight rather than sealed in a dark crate for who knew how long. I turned it over, revealing more symbols on the reverse side.

  The instant my fingers traced the central pattern, the overhead lights flickered—a brief, pulsing dimming that matched the rhythm of the glowing symbols from my dream. The computers whined as they rebooted, and somewhere in the building, an alarm chirped once before falling silent.

  "Power surge," Dr. Chen's voice came from the doorway, making me start. "Seattle's electrical grid is notoriously temperamental."

  I hadn't heard her approach. How long had she been standing there, watching me?

  "I was just—" I began, but she waved away my explanation.

  "Cataloging, as instructed." She crossed the room with brisk efficiency, examining my work. "Interesting piece," she added, nodding at the pendant still clutched in my hand.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  "The markings aren't consistent with other Santorini finds," I said, forcing my voice to remain professionally neutral. "They don't appear to be Minoan or early Greek."

  "No," she agreed, studying the pendant without touching it. "They don't. Make sure you document it thoroughly. I want close-up photographs of each symbol."

  Her tone was casual, but something in her posture had changed—a subtle alertness, like a predator catching a scent. She glanced at the bandage on my palm, then back at my face.

  "How did that happen?" she asked.

  "Cut myself on the table edge last night," I answered truthfully, if incompletely. "Clumsy."

  Dr. Chen nodded, her expression giving nothing away. "Be more careful. The museum's insurance doesn't cover staff carelessness."

  She left as silently as she'd appeared, but the weight of her scrutiny remained. I finished documenting the pendant, then placed it back in its protective wrapping, oddly reluctant to let it go. The power fluctuation had been a coincidence. Seattle's infrastructure was aging, prone to hiccups during storms or peak usage.

  But no storm raged outside. And at 10 AM on a Tuesday, the city was hardly experiencing peak electrical demand.

  I completed the cataloging by noon, my stomach reminding me I'd skipped breakfast. The museum café offered overpriced sandwiches and decent coffee; most days I brought lunch from home to save money. Today, however, the thought of leaving the building—leaving the pendant—felt wrong. Instead, I took my laptop to a quiet corner table, ordered the cheapest sandwich on the menu, and began searching the museum's digital archives.

  The pendant wasn't listed in any of the preliminary documentation for the Santorini collection. Strange, given the meticulous nature of archaeological expeditions. I expanded my search, looking for similar symbols in other collections.

  To my surprise, access to several databases opened automatically as I searched—restricted archives that should have required separate login credentials I didn't possess. Page after page of internal research documents scrolled across my screen: expedition notes, specialist analyses, comparative studies of unusual artifacts with "non-standard iconography."

  I skimmed through them quickly, unease growing with each new document. Many contained references to artifacts with markings similar to the pendant's, all discovered at sites of ancient catastrophes—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, massive floods. The tone of the analyses grew increasingly speculative, with references to "pattern recurrence across disconnected civilizations" and "non-random symbolic distribution."

  One folder contained hundreds of photographs of artifacts bearing variations of the symbols from my dreams. I clicked through them with growing disbelief. Some were labeled with archaeological sites I recognized, others with location codes that meant nothing to me. All had acquisition dates within the last fifty years—recent enough that these finds should have made waves in the archaeological community. Yet I'd never seen any of them published or discussed in academic literature.

  "Finding anything interesting?"

  I slammed my laptop closed, heart hammering. Dr. Chen stood beside my table, a cup of tea in her hand, her eyes sharp behind her stylish glasses.

  "Just background research," I said, hating how guilty I sounded. "On the pendant."

  "Hmm." She sipped her tea, watching me over the rim of her cup. "The Santorini artifacts are priority. Best not to get distracted by... side interests."

  The pause was deliberate, weighted with meaning I couldn't decipher. I nodded, gathering my things with hands that weren't quite steady.

  "I'll get back to it right away."

  "Good." She smiled, the expression not reaching her eyes. "Oh, and Marcus? The museum's network has been experiencing some security anomalies lately. If you encounter any unusual access permissions, report them immediately."

  She knew. Somehow, she knew I'd accessed restricted files. But instead of calling me out directly, she'd issued this oblique warning. Why?

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of routine tasks. I avoided Research Room C and the pendant, focusing instead on updating catalog entries for a collection of Bronze Age tools. By five, my head throbbed with tension and the voice from my dream continued to echo through my thoughts at random intervals.

  Remember.

  Remember what?

  The late afternoon sun broke through Seattle's cloud cover as I left the museum, casting long shadows across the rain-slicked streets. I decided to walk the long way home, hoping fresh air might clear my head. The city bustled around me—office workers heading home, students from the nearby university crowding into coffee shops, tourists consulting maps on their phones.

  Normal life. Real life. Not dreams of glowing symbols or ancient voices or impossible blood-activated locks.

  I turned onto Fremont Avenue, a route I'd taken hundreds of times before. Halfway down the block, I stopped abruptly, overcome by a powerful sense of déjà vu. Not the mild, passing sensation most people experience, but something visceral and disorienting—as if I'd been here before, not just yesterday or last week, but centuries ago.

  The modern buildings blurred, overlaid with ghostly images of different structures—stone instead of steel and glass, with intricate carvings along roof edges and doorways. For a heart-stopping moment, I saw people moving among these phantom buildings, their clothing strange, their movements purposeful. And everywhere, the symbols from my dreams glowed faintly, etched into walls and pavements, pulsing with inner light.

  A sharp pain lanced through my head. Warm wetness trickled from my nose—blood, bright crimson against my pale fingers when I touched them to my face. The phantom images vanished, reality reasserting itself with jarring abruptness.

  "You okay, man?" A stranger stopped beside me, concern in his voice. "You need me to call someone?"

  "I'm fine," I managed, pressing my sleeve to my nose. "Just a nosebleed."

  He looked unconvinced but continued on his way, casting backward glances. I stood there until the bleeding stopped, trying to process what I'd seen. Hallucination brought on by stress? Some kind of seizure? Neither explanation felt right.

  By the time I reached my apartment building, dusk had fallen. Mrs. Petrova sat on the front stoop, feeding scraps to a cluster of pigeons. She looked up as I approached, her rheumy eyes fixing on the blood-stained cuff of my shirt.

  I climbed the stairs to my unit slowly, fatigue settling into my bones like lead weights. None of this made sense. Not the pendant, not the voice. And yet together, they formed a pattern I couldn't ignore, points connecting into a constellation I couldn't yet name.

  My door was locked, just as I'd left it that morning. No signs of forced entry, no scratches around the keyhole. I performed my usual security check out of habit—foster care instills certain precautions that never quite fade. Everything appeared normal. Untouched.

  Except my dream journal.

  It lay open on the coffee table, pages ruffled as if by a breeze. I always kept it closed, hidden in the drawer of my bedside table. Always. Vesper greeted me with her usual demanding meow, twining between my legs, but I barely noticed her as I approached the journal.

  It was open to entries from months ago—detailed sketches of symbols I'd dreamed during my first week in Seattle. Symbols I'd later painted onto the wall behind my desk in some half-remembered compulsion, only to panic the next morning and cover them with three coats of paint.

  Vesper jumped onto the desk, pawing at that exact section of wall. Her claws scraped against the paint, head tilted as if listening to something I couldn't hear. In the fading evening light, I could have sworn I saw a faint glow beneath the layers of paint—the symbols shining through, pulsing in the same rhythm as the museum lights had when I touched the pendant.

  Remember.

  The voice was clearer now, as if its owner stood just behind me. A woman's voice, both ancient and familiar. Commanding yet comforting.

  "Remember what?" I whispered aloud, my own voice strange in the quiet apartment.

  Vesper turned her single amber eye toward me, and for an impossible moment, I thought she might answer. Instead, she resumed pawing at the wall, more insistently now, her claws leaving visible marks in the paint.

  I moved closer, drawn by a compulsion I didn't understand. Beneath the scratches, something glinted—a faint golden light seeping through the layers of paint like water through cracks in a dam. Without conscious decision, I pressed my palm against the wall.

  The paint melted away beneath my touch, revealing the symbols I'd drawn months ago. They burned with inner light, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. And as I stood there, transfixed, the voice spoke again—no longer just in my mind, but in the room itself, clear as breaking glass:

  "Remember who you are."